Through the Kitchen Lens: Hasselback Potatoes

Making something with potatoes this week was a no brainer because I had bought a bag for last week’s mashed potato endeavor and have you ever smelled potatoes when they go bad? It’s kind of awful. I can’t let that happen. I had to use them up.

Hasselback potatoes are something I originally saw on a blog – or maybe it was Pinterest. Either way, the look of them appealed to me, and it seemed that with all of the slits cut into the top of the potato, it would eliminate that common dilemma of baked potatoes: the not-all-the-way-cooked middle of the potato.

[Note: I keep wanting to add an “e” to the end of “potato”. I know it doesn’t belong, but my fingers keep typing it.]

These are surprisingly easy – though they take awhile. I imagine they’d be a great side dish with, well… dang near anything. Today, I made it as a stand alone dish – and it was lunch. I kind of love the chance to cook on the weekends – partly because I’m not rushed after a long day of work, and partly because with autumn in full swing, the days are getting darker sooner and I don’t have as much natural light to photograph what I’m cooking.

I didn’t take many photographs while making this. Why? Because they’re potatoes. It’s hard to make a potato look interesting until it’s… SOMETHING.

So, you wash off the potato, peel it, dunk it in cold water, cut a bazillion slits in the top, add butter and sea salt, cook, add more butter, add breadcrumbs, broil, and then ADD MORE BUTTER.

The end result was heavenly.

I’ll definitely make these again. I can see adding some onion to them, maybe even some roast garlic? I just saw a recipe for these in this month’s Food Network magazine – it incorporated bacon. Bacon isn’t quite MY thing, but if it’s yours you may wanna track it down.